


Anne, Waiting.

by Lilysmum



Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-03 03:07:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6594220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilysmum/pseuds/Lilysmum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Season 3, XXV - Anne's thoughts as she waits with the cache of jewels for Jack's return from Nassau.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anne, Waiting.

Anne Bonny hates to wait.

And it’s been hours now. She is hungry, she is tired, and worst of all she is bored. Anne does not cope well with boredom, she never has.  It makes her want to drink. And fight. And fuck. In that order.

The only option of the three she has is to drink. So she sips the rum and saves their water, resting in the shade with the horse to wait for Jack’s return. Resting is another thing that rubs Anne the wrong way. Waste of time, for the most part, time that they have precious little of.

The mid-day heat prickles along the back of her neck under her hair, and itches her wrists inside her sleeves. When she cannot stay still any longer she stands and stretches her limbs, pacing in a circle. She’s frustrated with him now, and he will hear it from her when he gets back. It’s just like him, she knows, just like Jack Rackham, to risk everything for the sake of a name, the only thing left to him by his long-dead father.

She shakes her head and kicks impatiently at pebbles with the toe of her boot, firing them with deadly accuracy at a tree stump across the path.

“Hurry up Rackham,” She spits his name out like a curse.

 

He fancies himself, does Jack. More than that. Jack loves himself.

It amuses her, the way he watches in the mirror when they fuck. Looking at her, yes, but she suspects he spends as much time watching himself. He’s never done it yet but half of the time she expects him to say his own name when he comes.

And then there’s the preening.  The primping and fussing in front of the mirror every morning. The clothing, the hair.  Those ridiculous glasses. She had disdained it at first. She’d never fully understood the habit in women, even, and she’d certainly never witnessed it to this extent in a man. But she gives him that now, that privilege of time to make himself acceptable to himself. She understands, she really does. Deprived of his birthright by forces beyond his meagre control he’d had to find his own path. Making headway by bare inches, knocked back first by downright unfairness, and then by fists and blades and others’ bullheaded stupidity, the slender and undersized teenager eventually grew into his own idea of himself. Tall. Smart. Strong. A force to be reckoned with.  For a long time in his life there had been no one to love him. No one to even see him. He’d had to do it himself.

It’s why she hadn’t really argued with him when he said he had to go back to get the pardon. She knew he was living the dream that another man named Rackham had never seen. It’s why he was determined to carry that name. Wherever he took it, she knew, he would also take pride.  Anne would let him have his time. Even if the waiting did drive her half-crazy.

 

When she hears the approaching horse she sighs with relief. So he’d been successful, then, and he’d ridden back to save time. But her relief turns to angered frustration when the white horse comes into view ridden by a red-coated piece of British shit who she suspects is not long for this world.

“Anne Bonny!” the man calls as he pulls his horse up. She only hesitates for a minute before she steps out into the path, her hand already twitching at her belt.

“I’ve come at the request of Mr. Jack Rackham,” the messenger announces, “I am bearing communication of the utmost importance for you Madam. Your response is required immediately and I have been instructed to ensure your safe passage back to Nassau.”

 

The penmanship is Jack’s, yes, but the words are imposters. She understands immediately that she is not to take them at face value.  The true message Jack has written for her is woven delicately through the passage in his carefully practiced hand. It would be impossible for anyone but her to find it.

She surprises the messenger with a quick left hand and in the time it takes him to reach for his sword it’s over. Her blade passes through his flesh with a satisfying sluicing sound, exhilarating her. The strike is executed perfectly, hitting neither bones nor sinew, just opening the flesh wide enough for life to leave the body effortlessly. She watches just long enough for the spasms to stop and for him to finish bleeding out before she turns on her heel.

“What the fuck, Jack,” she sighs in frustration, “Do you not even know me?”

Because she will not do as he asks. She will not take their cache of jewels and simply run.    

 

They’d had a child together years ago and that, for her, more than anything else, was what had cemented their bond. Not in the usual, expected way. Not in the way she imagines other couples grow closer as they create little beings that are of both their flesh, but in an opposite way, a perverse one, she knows, yet in a way that is just as valid as and more meaningful to her than anything could ever be.

She hadn’t wanted it, their child, and she told Jack so from the start. She remembers his hands on her swollen belly one evening, feeling with a type of reverence for the infant’s strengthening kicks, and the wonder in his eyes when he felt them.

“I don’t want it,” She stated flatly, and then, to drive her point home, “I won’t keep it.”

“Give it time, Darling,” Jack tried to soothe her with a smile, “give it time, you’ll see.”

But Anne knew differently. After the midway point of the pregnancy she could no longer be at sea. Stuck in Cuba, awaiting the birth, all she wanted was for it to be over so she could be back on the ship with Jack. She knew that there would be no epiphany, no sudden change of heart after she gave birth. She’d thought that the ocean had become her true home. But waiting, waiting, day by day, missing him more than she had even thought possible, she understood what home was. Her home was Jack, and wherever the two of them may be.

 

She’d had a pet cat when she was a child, a white Persian she named Annabelle. Annabelle followed her everywhere, and she’d enjoyed smoothing down its long silky hair with her fingers, she’d enjoyed the ease with which she could elicit the purr. One day Annabelle took a fit, first running in circles and then thrashing about, spewing pink froth from her mouth before her small body stretched out stiff as a board and she died on the floor at Anne’s feet.

People had tried to comfort Anne. They told her not to cry and she hadn’t. What they didn’t know is that she wouldn’t have, anyway. She didn’t understand why someone would cry because a cat died.  That was the day that she began to understand that she was not like other people.

It was the same feeling, or lack thereof, she guesses, that she experienced watching silently as their son’s small body emerged from her own. The woman attending the birth had wept tears of joy. But the only emotion Anne felt was gratitude that the crushing pains had stopped.

In the coming days she held her son, she fed him and washed him, she did her duty by him. She was a mother now, even if she did not feel the part. But her heart was empty and the only thing she felt towards the child was that he deserved more.

The gladness returned to her heart upon Jack’s return, as she saw him literally running from the beach to reach her, and to meet his son. There was nothing in her that could match the pride she saw in him. Jack was smitten with the infant. More than smitten. He was fascinated, captivated, strutting around like the cock of the walk. Anne could understand why. She just knew that she could not feel that way herself.

Their wee boy was beautiful, perfect, with sea green eyes in a delicately-featured face and a full head of dark tousled hair, his body covered with pure unblemished white skin just like his father’s.

Jack held the infant up to sunlight streaming in the window, peering into the tiny face that was so like his own.

“His eyes will darken,” he predicted, nodding over his shoulder to Anne, “he’ll likely have my eyes, in time.”

But Anne could not do it. She could not look upon the child with anything more than mild interest. It was as if he already belonged to someone else. She would not be able to stay in one place to be his mother any more than she could stay someplace else and be some man’s wife. And this new tiny life did not deserve, she knew, to be spent with someone like her.

And so the baby was given to others, to a kind woman whose own child had died, and a gentle man who loved her. Anne didn’t care what others said.  It was more right than it could ever be wrong.

She would never forget Jack’s face, that day, the day they made the choice. The day _she_ made their choice, to leave their son and go back to the ship. His only stipulation had been that the other couple tell the child, when he was old enough to understand, who his parents had been. And he’d only looked heartbroken until he turned his gaze back to her.

“I choose you,” he explained, although she had not said a word, “Anne I will always choose you.”

And she knew, in that instant, what she had, and who she was.

 

Maybe, she thinks now, settling herself down in a shady spot to await whomever would come after her next, maybe Jack’s insistence on clearing his name also had something to do with their son. It would make it possible, perhaps, for the child to find them, later, if he so chose.

It was months before they spoke of it. She didn’t often think of the child although she imagined Jack did. She studied the wistful set of his face as he stroked the skin along her side with his fingers one evening in bed. Any other man, she felt, would resent her.

“There’s something left out of me,” she said at last, by way of explanation, trailing her fingers over the fine skin of his shoulder, tracing a scar.

Jack turned his face up to her then, and she stared into eyes the colour of coffee, or of chocolate or of warm dark earth.

He shook his head slowly.

“No Anne,” he told her, “I prefer to think of it as something extra having been added.” He fingered the tiny shells woven into her hair, then cradled her breast in his hand, “I see something in you that doesn’t exist anywhere else.” He dropped his mouth to the skin of her shoulder, “My Darling,” he added, beginning a slow circle on her skin with his tongue, “if I get to have my way, we will always be together.”

Always be together. Yes. She’d felt it but not been able to articulate it. As a young woman she had thought herself incapable of feeling such a thing. That was something that happened with other people, not with her. But she knew now that to live without Jack Rackham could be likened to living without air, or without water. She would die. Until now it had been a nameless feeling, almost uneasy in its mystery.  

Her body arched upward to his touch, and a small moan escaped her lips as she pulled her fingers through his silky dark hair. Jack moaned in response and the mere sound sent a tremor flowing up her spine. He slid his mouth to her breast, his tongue still circling, while at the same time his hand moved down, and down, to nudge her slender thighs apart and slide between folds already slick and slippery, his fingers setting up a rhythm to match the slow pull of his mouth.

“Fuck, Jack,” she moaned, and despite the harshness of the words they slid off her tongue like melted butter, drawing his eyes upwards to meet her own.  Until she met Jack she had never truly wanted a man. Never wanted a man’s hands on her skin, never wanted to feel his cock inside her body. Her marriage to James Bonny was a means to an end, her only chance at the life she wanted, or so she thought. It was usually the female form, really, the soft curves and smooth skin of women that had aroused her. Until Jack.

“Hurry up, Rackham,” she all but begged. They were not the words she wanted to use but her eyes told him everything.

She would never leave him.  

 

The governor’s men arrive before long to retrieve the body. Anne watches from the shadows their half-hearted attempts to locate her before they ride away. Someone else will be sent for her shortly, she knows.  If they didn’t understand that she would not leave without Jack, they at least would realize that she could not travel far alone with such cargo. It will be a woman, she surmises, that will be sent.  Any of the men left in Nassau that knew her would be too frightened. It will likely be Max, she feels. Eleanor was far too valuable for Rogers to risk her safety. Max would assure them that she knew enough about Anne to be able to return her to Nassau, and she would be believed. Of course she would.

She paces a straight line in a hollow in the ground between two small trees and then turns and walks it back again. She counts her steps, and recounts them, counts seconds, minutes. She hates this. Hates waiting around for things to be decided by others. She hasn’t got his patience, Jack’s. That’s his strength, she knows, it’s what makes him a true leader. Jack has the big ideas, he knows the right things, and he is decisive. But he tempers it with the ability to wait until others see things his way, to draw people over to his side. Jack knows how to wait. But waiting kills Anne. And it is only Jack that she would wait for, anyway.

“Come on Max,” she sighs, squinting over a hill from her hiding spot, “I haven’t got all year.”

 

And sure enough Max arrives. She stands in the clearing alone, turning this way and that, showing herself as if standing in front of a mirror, or as if Anne cannot see.  

Anne is unaffected by the silly charade. Whore’s gotten too big for her boots, thinking she can negotiate an exchange of the jewels for Jack’s return. As if.

“They are hurting him, Anne,” Max tells her, at last.

“What?” Anne feels the blood drain from her face, from her limbs. Despite the heat of the day her body is suddenly chilled to gooseflesh.

Hurting him. Hurting Jack. Anne’s stomach stirs. She imagines him being tied. Beaten. Burned. Whipped. She can hear the blows thumping off of his flesh. She can see his defiance and his smug smile as he takes it, takes it, and takes it again. The fools would think they could torture her location out of him but they’re wrong, they don’t know him.  If he wouldn’t give up his name, he would never surrender her. Or the fortune they’d risked everything to gain. They’d beaten the game. They’d won, and he knew it. He would never give that up. They would have to kill him first.  

Fuck Max.

Fuck her for knowing Anne’s only weakness.  

Fuck her for knowing that if that were the case she would have no choice but to concede. Max knows Anne. But Anne also knows Max. And she knows that if it were true, if Jack were being tortured, Max would have told her straight off, rather than holding onto the knowledge like a trump card to be used when necessary.

Anne stares murder down at Max.

“Fuck. You.” Anne tells her. She considers gutting the whore’s sleek golden body like a fish, then decides against it.

That can wait.

She turns her horse and rides away.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> My first fic for this fandom. Beta read by the very beautiful glowcult.


End file.
